1.  The national spirits that become aware of the shape of their essence in a particular animal go together into one spirit [VII.A.b. Plant and animal §1.6 M]; so also do the particular beautiful national spirits unite in one pantheon whose element and dwelling is language.  ²The pure intuition of itself as universal humanity has in the actual reality of the national spirit the form that with the others, with whom through nature it constitutes one nation, it combines for a common undertaking, for which it builds a whole nation and a common heaven.  ³This universality to which the spirit attained in its existence is, however, only this first one that starts from the individuality of the customary ethical order, has not overcome its immediacy, and has not constructed one state from these tribes.  ⁴The customary ethical order of the actual national spirit rests partly on the immediate trust of the individual in the whole of its own people and partly on the immediate stake all have, irrespective of differences of order or class, in the decisions and actions of the government.  ⁵In the unification, initially not into a persisting order, but only for the sake of a common activity, that freedom of the stake of all and each is temporarily set aside.  ⁶This first common union is thus more of an assembly of individualities than the rule of the abstract thought, which would rob the single individuals of their self-conscious stakes in the will and action of the whole.

2.  The assembly of national spirits makes up a circle of patterns that now encompasses the whole of nature as well as the whole customary ethical world.  ²They too stand rather under the ultimate orders of the one than his ultimate domination.  ³For itself each is one of the universal substances of that which the self-conscious essence is and does in itself.  ⁴That self-conscious essence constitutes the force and the centre of gravity, as it were, of what concerns those universal essences, which initially only coincidentally appears to bind their activities.  ⁵But it is the return of the divine essence back into self-consciousness that already contains the reason why this forms the centre for those divine forces and conceals the essential unity initially under the form of a friendly external relation of the two worlds.

3.  The same universality belonging to this content also necessarily has the form of the consciousness in which it emerges [VII.B.a. Abstract artwork §12 ff. M].  ²It is no longer the actual action of the cult, but an action that is not yet elevated into the concept, but at first only into imagination, into the synthetic binding of self-conscious existence and external existence.  ³The existence of this imagination, language, is the first language, i.e. epic as such, to contain the universal content, at least as the completeness of the world, although not as the universality of thought.  ⁴The singer is the single individual and the actual one from out of which, as the subject of this world, the language is generated and carried.  ⁵Its pathos is not the narcotic natural power, but Mnemosyne, sober reflection and the inwardness it has arrived at, the memory, turning inward, of what formerly was immediate essence.  ⁶It is the organ that vanishes into its own content, that does not count as its own self, but its muse, its universal song.  ⁷What we in fact have here is the syllogism in which the extreme of universality, the world of the gods, is bound to the singularity, the singer, through the midpoint of particularity.  ⁸The midpoint is the people in its heroes, who are single, individual human beings, like the singer, but only imagined and therefore also universal, like the free extreme of universality, the gods.

4.  In this epic we have thus in nuce for consciousness what in the cult in itself emerges, namely the relation between human and divine [VII.B.a. Abstract artwork §10 M].  ²The content is an action of the essence, the being, which is conscious of itself.  ³The action disturbs the peace of substance and stimulates the essence so that its simplicity is divided and opened up to the diverse world of natural and customary ethical forces.  ⁴The action is the wounding of the quiet earth, the grotto, animated by the blood that calls up the departed spirits who, thirsty for life, receive it in the action of self-consciousness.  ⁵The activity with which the general energy is concerned acquires the two sides.  One is self-like and comes from the totality of actual nations and the individualities standing at their heads.  The other, the universal one that is accomplished by their substantial powers.  ⁶The relation between the two, however, was previously determined such that it is the synthetic compound of the universal and the single, individual, i.e it is imagination.  ⁷The evaluation of this world depends on this determinateness.

– ⁸This makes the relation between the two a mixing that inconsistently distributes the unity of the act and the throws the action in a superfluous manner from one side to the other.  ⁹The general powers have the shape of individuality and with that the principle of action within them; their effectiveness appears thus as an act just as freely proceeding completely from them as one proceeding from the individuals.  ¹⁰Gods and men have thus done both the one and the same.  ¹¹The seriousness of those powers is a laughable surplus, since they in fact are the force of the acting individualities and the effort and labour of this force is just as much a wasted effort, for the former govern everything.

– ¹²The daytime mortals, who are nothing, are simultaneously the powerful self that subjugates the universal essences, harms the gods and is all that endows them with reality and an interest in action; just as conversely these impotent universalities that nourish themselves on the talents of men and only get something to do through them, are the natural essence and the stuff of all circumstances, being just as much the customary ethical material and the pathos of action.  ¹³When the elemental natures are first brought into reality and into an activated relation by the free self of individuality, they are just as much the universal that slips this linkage, remains unlimited in its definition and through the unsurpassable elasticity of its unity extinguishes the point character of its activity and its figurations, holds itself pure and dissolves everything individual in its fluidity.

5.  They fall into this contradictory relation with the opposing self-like nature, just as their universality falls into conflict with its own definition and its relation to others.  ²They are the eternal beautiful individuals, at rest in their own existence, who are freed from transitoriness and alien violence.

– ³But they are at the same time specific elements, particular gods, who thus relate to others.  ⁴Now, the relation to others which, given its opposition, is a conflict with them in fact amounts to a comic self-forgetfulness of their eternal nature.

– ⁵The definiteness has taken root in divine persistence and has in its limitation the independence of the whole individuality and through this their characters lose the sharpness of peculiarity while taking on their ambiguity.

– ⁶A goal of activity and their activity itself, since it is directed against another and hence against an invincible divine force, is a contingent, empty sprawl that similarly runs out, reducing the apparent seriousness of the activity to a safe game, secure in itself, without result or success.  ⁷If, however, the negative or the determinateness of divinity appears in the nature of divinity itself only as the inconsistency of its activity and as the contradiction of the goal and the success, independent security holds the greater weight over the definite one, this means that the pure force of the negative confronts it, indeed, as its last power against which it can do nothing.  ⁸They are what are universal and positive against the single, individual self of the mortals, which does not hold out against their power; but the universal self floats for that reason above them and over this whole world of imagination, to which the whole content belongs as the concept-free emptiness of necessity – an occurrence against which they behave selflessly and with mourning for these determinate natures doe not find themselves in this purity.

6.  This necessity is the unity of the concept, to which are subject the contradictory substantiality of the single, individual moments in which the inconsistency and contingency of their action is ordered; the play of their behaviour acquires its seriousness and value in those moments.  ²The content of the world of imagination plays out its motion separated for itself in the midpoint, collected around the individuality of a hero who feels in his force and beauty that his life is broken and mourns for it as he proceeds towards an early death.  ³For the in itself fixed and real singularity is excluded in the extremity, its moments split, not yet having found each other in unity.  ⁴The one single individual, abstract and unreal, is the necessity that has no part in the life of the midpoint; as little as the other, real single individual, the singer, who keeps himself outside him and is destroyed in his imagination.  ⁵Both extremes must approach closer to the content.  The one, the necessity, must fill itself up with the content while the other, the language of the singer, must have a part in it and must take into itself the content that was previously left to itself, the certainty and firm definition of the negative.

7.  This higher language, tragedy, brings the dispersed moments of the essential and active world closer together.  The substance of the divine separates out into its patterns according to the nature of the concept and their motion is also congruent with the concept.  ²As to form, language ceases to be a story-telling when it enters into the content, just as the content here ceases to be something imagined.  ³The hero is himself the one speaking and the presentation shows the listener, who is also spectator, self-conscious character fully cognizant of their right and their purpose, knowing the power and the will in their definite roles and know how to declare these things.  ⁴They are artists who do not declare the externals of their decision and beginning without awareness, naturally and naively, as in the language accompanying common action in daily life.  No, they express, externalize, the inner essence demonstrating the right of their action and the pathos they belong to free of contingent circumstances and from the particularities of personality and they calmly, thoughtfully and precisely express its universal individuality.  ⁵The existence of these characters at last consists of finite, real people, drawn from the persons of the heroes, representing them as real, not in story-telling style, in their own words.  ⁶As essential as it is to the statue that it is made by the hand of man [VII.B.a. Abstract artwork §4.4 M], no less essentially is the actor his mask – not as external condition from which the art appreciation must abstract – or else if abstraction is vital to the mask, then the art does not yet include within it the true, genuine self.

8.  The general ground on which the motion of these patterns born of the concept happens is the consciousness of that first imagining language and its selfless content that is left in its separation.  ²It's the common people's wisdom that finds expression in the choir of the elders.  The people have their representatives in the choir's powerlessness because it only provides the positive and passive material to the individuality of the government confronting it.  ³Lacking the power of the negative, it is not capable of holding and binding together the wealth and the colourful fullness of divine life; instead they let it run apart and praises each single moment as an independent god, now this one, now another, in their worshipful hymns.  ⁴Where, however, the people sense the seriousness of the concept as it rides roughshod over these patterns, tearing them apart, and they actually sees how badly their hallowed gods do when they venture onto the ground ruled by the concept, then it is not the negative power itself that actively intervenes.  No, they keep to the selfless thought of that action in the consciousness of an alien destiny and bring the empty wish of pacification and the weak talk of mollification to expression.  ⁵Here is the fear of the higher powers, immediate arms of substance, the fear of their struggle with each other and fear of the simple self of necessity that crushes them and the mortals linked to them.  There's also the sympathy with those, whom the people knows to be the same as itself.  For the people this is all just the passive horror of this motion, the equally helpless regret and the end of it all is the empty calm of submission to necessity, whose work is not grasped as the necessary action of the characters nor as the action of absolute essence, absolute being, within itself.

9.  Spirit's appearance in this observing consciousness, as also on the indifferent ground of imagination, is not its dispersed diversity, but the simple split of the concept.  ²So its substance presents itself only in the two extreme powers torn apart from each other.  ³These elemental, universal essences are simultaneously self-conscious individualities – heroes who assert their consciousness in one of these powers, find definition of character therein so that they constitute their activation and actual reality.

– ⁴This universal individualization descends, as we saw, down into the immediate reality of genuine existence, showing itself to a number of spectators, who see their own image in the choir; indeed, their own talking image.

10.  Content and motion of the spirit that is here object to itself has already been considered as the nature and realization of customary ethical substance.  ²In its religion it attains consciousness of itself, presenting itself within its own consciousness in its purer form and simpler patterning.  ³When then customary ethical substance divides itself into the two powers by virtue of its own concept according to its content, the two powers that were specified as divine and human, as subterranean and upper laws – the former the family and the latter state power; the feminine facing the other, the latter, masculine character – then this is how the previously diverse circle of gods, varying in characters [VI.A.a. Customary ethical world etc. §4.4 ff. and §14.4 ff.; §4.8-§5 above M] is restricted to these powers, which indeed are brought closer to genuine individuality through this specification.  ⁴For the former dispersion of the whole into various abstract forces, which appeared in forms given substance, is the dissolution of the subject that it only comprehends as a moment within its self; so individuality here is only the superficial form of those essences.  ⁵Conversely, a further difference of the characters, additional to the one given, must be seen as contingent and inherently external personality.

11.  Essence also divides itself according to its form, according to knowledge.  ²Active spirit confronts as consciousness the object on which it acts; the object is then determined as the negative of the knowing one, so the acting one, the agent, is caught in the opposition of knowledge and ignorance.  ³Taking its purpose from its character, it knows that to be the customary ethical essence, although the definition of character restricts its knowledge to only the one power of substance, the other one remaining hidden from it.  ⁴This is why present reality is one thing in itself and something else for consciousness.  In this relation, the upper law takes on the meaning of the knowing power revealing itself to consciousness, while the lower law is then the power concealing itself and lurking in ambush.  ⁵The one is the side of light, the god of the oracle, born of the sun, illuminating all in its natural moments, that knows all and reveals all – Phoebus [Apollo] and Zeus, his father.  ⁶But the commands of this truth-telling god and his announcements of what is are in fact deceptive.  ⁷For this knowledge is in its concept immediately, initially, ignorance, because consciousness is in action inherently this opposition.  ⁸The one who was able to solve the riddle of the sphinx [Oedipus], just like the one childishly trusting, are sent to their doom by what the god reveals to them.  ⁹This priestess, through whom the beautiful god speaks, is the same as the ambiguous, bisemantic, sisters of destiny [Macbeth Act I, scene 3], who drive people to crime with their promises, deceiving those who rely on the revealed meaning of the assurances they deliver with forked tongue.  ¹⁰Purer than this consciousness that believes the witches and more thoughtful and thorough than the one before that trusted the priestess and the beautiful god, in the revelation that the spirit of the [i.e. Hamlet's] father itself gives on the crime of his murder, it procrastinates over the revenge, pondering other evidence, because this revelatory spirit could be the devil [Shakespeare, Hamlet Act II, scene 2 end].

12.  This mistrust is justified because knowing consciousness here consists of the opposition between its self-certainty and that of objective essence.  ²The right of the customary ethical order is that actual reality is nothing in itself in opposition to absolute law.  Here, however, it learns that its knowledge is one-sided, that its law is only the law of its own character, that it only grasped the one power of substance.  ³The action itself is this reversal of what is known into its opposite, being; it is the switching of the right of character and of knowledge into the right of the opposed side, with which the former is linked in the essence of substance – in the Erinnies [or Furies] of the other power and character, now roused to enmity.  ⁴This lower law sits with Zeus on the throne and enjoys the same respect as the revealed law and the knowing god.

13.  The world of the gods in the choir is restricted by the acting individuality to these three essences or beings.  ²The one is the substance, also the power of the hearth and the spirit of family piety, just as it is the general power of the state and the government.  ³Since this difference belongs to substance as such, it is individualized in imagination not into two distinct patterns, but has in reality the two persons of its characters.  ⁴In contrast, the difference of knowledge and ignorance falls in each of the actual self-consciousnesses and only in abstraction, in the element of universality, does it divide itself into two individual patterns.  ⁵For the self, the hero, only has existence as a whole consciousness and is for that reason essentially the whole difference, which belongs to the form; but its substance is definite and only the one side of the difference of content belongs to it.  ⁶This is why the two sides of consciousness, which in reality do not have separate individualities personal to each, each retain their own particular pattern in imagination.  The one, that of the revealing god and the other that of the Erinny [Fury] keeping itself hidden.  ⁷Both enjoy the same honour, but it is also true that the pattern of substance, Zeus, is the necessity of their relation to each other.  ⁸The substance is the relation that the knowledge is for itself, but its truth lies in simplicity, that the difference giving actual consciousness existence has its ground in the inner essence destroying the difference, and that the assurance of certainty, being clear to itself, finds its confirmation in forgetfulness.

14.  Consciousness revealed this opposition through its action.  Acting according to the revealed knowledge, it experiences the deception lying in it when it submits to the inside according to the one attribute of substance, hurting the other one as a consequence and thereby putting this one in the right against itself.  ²Following the knowing god, in fact it grasped what is not revealed and has to suffer punishment for having trusted that knowledge, whose ambiguity, which is its nature after all, is also for it, for consciousness, so there must have been a warning about that.  ³The ranting of the priestess, the inhuman appearance of the witches, the voice of the tree [Macbeth Act II, scene 3], of the bird [Macbeth Act III, scene 3], of the dream [Macbeth Act III, scene 5] etc., etc. are not the wise ones in whom the truth appears, but warning signs of deception, of the lack of thoughtfulness, of the singularity and contingency of knowledge.  ⁴Or, what amounts to the same thing, the opposed power hurt by this consciousness is present as current law and established right, whether it is the right of the family or of the state; consciousness, in contrast, followed its own knowledge and hid the revealed knowledge from itself.  ⁵The truth, however, of consciousness and content's powers ranged opposed to each other is the result that both are equally in the right and hence in their opposition, arising from the action, both are equally in the wrong.  ⁶The motion of the action demonstrates their unity in the mutual downfall of both powers and the self-conscious characters.  ⁷The reconciliation of the opposition with itself is Lethe of the underworld in death, or the Lethe of the upper world as the declaration of release not from guilt, for this consciousness cannot deny that since it has acted, but from the crime and its expiating pacification.  ⁸Both are forgetting, the vanishing of actual reality and of the action of the powers of substance, of its individualities and of the powers of the abstract thought of the good and evil.  After all, neither is for itself the essence, which itself is rather the calm of the whole within itself, the unmoved unity of destiny, the calm existence and as such the inactivity and absence of vitality of the family and the government; it is also the same honour and with that the indifferent unreality of Apollo and the Erinnies and the return of their being infused with spirit and activity to the simple, integral Zeus.

15.  This destiny completes the depopulation of heaven, putting an end to the thoughtless mixing of individuality and essence [§4.8 ff. and §10.3 above M] – a mixture that makes the action of the essence, of the being, appear to be inconsistent, contingent, and unworthy of itself; for that individuality hanging on to the essence only superficially is the inessential kind.  ²The elimination of such images devoid of essence demanded by the philosophers of the ancient world thus actually begins in tragedy with the domination of the division of substance by the concept so that individuality here is the essential kind and the defining features are absolute characters.  ³The self-consciousness imagined in tragedy thus knows and recognizes only one highest power: Zeus only as the power of the state or of the hearth and, in the opposition of knowledge, only as the father of the knowledge of the particular that is coming into shape – and as the Zeus of the oath and the Erinnies, of the universal, the inside dwelling in concealment.  ⁴The moments dispersing themselves further from out of the concept into imagination that the choir asserts one after the other are, in contrast, not the pathos of the hero, but for him they descend into passion – to contingent, essence-free moments that the selfless choir certainly praises, but which are not capable of making out the character of the hero nor of being declared by them to be their essence and to be respected as such.

16.  The persons of the divine essence too, just like the characters of its substance, all go into the simplicity of what is without consciousness together.  ²This necessity has the defining characteristic in opposition to self-consciousness of being the negative power of all emerging patterns, i.e. of not recognizing itself and suffering its downfall in them.  ³The self only emerges into appearance as it is assigned to the characters, not as the midpoint of the motion.  ⁴But the self-consciousness, the simple self-certainty, is in fact the negative power, the unity of Zeus, of substantial essence and abstract necessity; it is the spiritual unity into which everything returns.  ⁵Since the actual self-consciousness is still differentiated from the substance and the destiny, it is partly the choir, or better the spectating many who are filled with fear by this motion of divine life as something alien; in this motion the fear, because it comes so close, produces only the emotion of passive sympathy.  ⁶This unification is external partly because consciousness acts along with and belongs to the characters, while the true unification, that of the self, of destiny and substance, is not yet present, and this all makes it hypocrisy.  The hero appearing before the spectators breaks down into mask and actor, into the person and the actual self.

17.  The self-consciousness of the hero must emerge from behind his mask and present itself as it knows itself to be, i.e. as the destiny of the gods of the choir as well as that of the absolute powers themselves, no longer separated from the choir, from universal consciousness.

18.  Comedy thus happens above all when actual self-consciousness presents itself as the destiny of the gods.  ²These elemental beings are universal moments, not selves and not really actual.  ³They are equipped with the form of individuality, but it is in fact only a conceit; it doesn't belong to them as such in and for itself.  The real self does not have such an abstract moment for its substance and content.  ⁴It, the subject, is thus elevated above such a moment, as it is above any single property, and decked out with this mask it expresses the irony of the mask in wanting to be something for itself.  ⁵The breaking up of the universal essence is betrayed to the self; it shows that it is captive to a reality and lets the mask fall precisely because it wants to be in the right.  ⁶It plays the self, here appearing as actual, with the mask, which it puts on to be its person only to emerge soon enough from this appearance into it own nakedness and common habits, demonstrating that it is no different from the genuine self, nor from the actor or the spectator .

19.  This general dissolution of the patterned essence into its individuality gets more serious in its content and hence more mischievous and bitter as that content takes on its more serious and more necessary significance.  ²The divine substance unites within it the significance of natural and customary ethical essence.  ³As to nature, in using nature for its decoration, housing, etc. actual self-consciousness demonstrates in the banquet of the sacrifice that it is the destiny to which the secret is betrayed of its relation to the self-like essence of nature.  In the mystery of the bread and wine, actual self-consciousness makes that relation, together with the significance of the inner essence, its own; in comedy it is fully aware of the irony of this significance [VII.B.a. Abstract artwork §14.5 ff. and §15.2 ff.; VII.B.b. Living artwork §2.4-§5 M].

– ⁴Where this significance includes customary ethical essence, it is partly the people, in both its manifestations, i.e. state or real demos and family singularity; but partly also self-conscious, pure knowledge, the rational thinking of the universal.

– ⁵That demos, the general mass of the population, which knows itself to be at once the lord and regent as well as the understanding and insight that have to be respected, compels and fools itself through the particularity of its actual reality, exhibiting the laughable contrast between its opinion of itself and its immediate existence, its necessity and its contingency, its universality and its commonness.  ⁶When its principle of that singularity separated from universality pushes itself forward in the genuine shape of actual reality and, while in fact secretly damaging the it, publicly claims to be the community, furnishing its infrastructure, then the contrast is even more immediately revealed between the universal as theory and what is really of concern in practice, namely the complete liberation of the intentions of immediate singularity from the universal order and the former's ridicule of the latter.

20.  Rational thinking relieves the divine being of its contingent shape and sets opposed to it the concept-free wisdom of the choir with its numerous customary sayings and affirms a number of laws and particular concepts of duty and right, elevating them into the simple ideas of beauty and goodness.

– ²The motion of this abstraction is the consciousness of the dialectic inherent to these maxims and laws and with that the disappearance of the absolute validity they previously appeared to possess [§7.3 ff. above M].  ³Now the coincidental definition and superficial individuality the imagination lent the divine essences [§4.8-§5 and §15 above M] vanishes, so on their natural side all that remains to them is the nakedness of their immediate existence.  They are clouds, vanishing mist, like those images.  ⁴In terms of their thought essence they become the simple thoughts of beauty and goodness, so these can accept being filled with any arbitrary content.  ⁵The force of dialectical knowledge abandons the definite laws and maxims of social interaction to the joy and foolhardiness, to the – hence – corrupted youth and puts weapons in the hands of anxious and concerned elders, who are confined to the details of life.  ⁶The comic theatre piece thus exhibits the pure thoughts of beauty and goodness rendered empty through liberation from opinion, which contains both their definition as content and their absolute definition, namely the fixed definition of consciousness, showing how in this way they become the play of opinion and the arbitrariness of contingent individuality.

21.  Here then the formerly unconscious destiny, consisting of empty calm and oblivion, which was separated from self-consciousness is now united with it.  ²The single, individual self is the negative force in and through which the gods, as well as their moments, existing nature and the thoughts of their definition features, vanish.  That self is not the emptiness of vanishing, but sustains itself in this nullity, is by itself and the only actual reality.  ³The religion of art has perfected itself in this self and has completely returned back into itself.  ⁴Since the single consciousness in the certainty of itself is what presents itself as this absolute power, this loses the form of something imagined, separated from consciousness as such and alien to it like the statue, or the living, beautiful sensuality of the body, or the content of the epics, or the powers and persons of tragedy [VII.B.a. Abstract artwork §§4, 5; VII.B.b. Living artwork §6; VII.b.c. Spiritual artwork §§4, 5 and §7.1 ff. M].  Neither is the unity the unconscious unity of cult and mysteries [VII.B.a. Abstract artwork §10.1 ff.; VII.B.b. Living artwork §§3-5 M].  Rather, the genuine self of the actor falls together with his person just as it does with that of the spectator, who is fully at home and sees himself performing in what is presented to him.  ⁵What this self-consciousness sees is that what in it takes on the form of essence against it in fact dissolves in its thinking, existence and action and is abandoned.  It is the return of all universality into the certainty of itself, which is thus a complete lack of fear before anything alien, an awareness that the alien lacks essence; it is the well-being of consciousness, letting itself relax, the like of which is nowhere to be found outside this comedy.